This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are my philosophy professor's objections to the biological definition of race sound?
My philosophy of race class has considered and dismissed the biological definition of race. We've explored five objections to race-as-biological:
Objection 1: It isn't possible to locate the boundaries between racial types with any precision. The biological definition of race aims to divide humanity into distinct categories on the basis of physiological traits that don't admit of clean divisions. but this is hopelessly arbitrary given the absence of differences of kind between purported racial groups (there are only differences of degree). Skin color, for instance, varies along a continuum without discrete segments that perfectly track racial distinctions. "Short" and "tall" aren't good enough for anatomy or basketball, and neither can the imprecise idea of "races." Race attempts to bracket "lumps" apart from each other, but this is a vain effort because there are only continuua.
Objection 2: Scientific authority: Scientists don't talk of "races" but instead prefer to speak of "populations." As John H. Relethford says in his introduction to biological anthropology:
Objection 3: There are no reliable lumpings/clusters of characteristics for "race" to track. For example, skin color is supposed to go with a certain hair texture and with certain facial features, consistently, but racial traits just don't hang together this way: many dark skinned people have straight hair, aquiline noses, thin lips, and many light skinned people have curled hair, full lips, and wide noses.
Objection 4: Modern dictionaries do not define race biologically.
The last objection makes very little sense to me, but here goes:
Objection 5: Human heredity is much more complicated than the transmission of racial essences. It involves a myriad of environmental factors, to produce the traits that distinguish humans from each other. Biological race-thinking is incapable of producing an adequate scientific account of this complexity.
Do you find these objections convincing? If not, why not?
This isn't a strong argument. It's hard to draw exact boundaries around many phenotypes or human phenomena. What exact shade of hair makes one blonde rather than brown haired? When does a Norwood 2 become a Norwood 3? How many dicks do you need to suck before you're gay? This doesn't mean those phenotypes don't exist.
Short and tall are meaningful words that nobody is going to stop using any time soon. Much like race being a proxy for other physical characteristics, 'tallness' is a proxy for the very obviously real physical characteristic of height.
This sort of very clever 'well what if my car only had three wheels' approach is not actually very clever or convincing.
Phenotypal characteristics are the product of gene-environment interaction - generally, in the absence of appropriate stimulus, your 'genetic capacity' to physically and mentally develop those characteristics is inert. What separates a human from an ape is that exposed to language, the human learns it and the ape doesn't.
That said, taking refuge in complexity is the mark of a sophist. Genetics is complicated, and race is a crude and imprecise construct - but one that still carries real information and creates real meaning.
More options
Context Copy link
I think Objections 1 and 5 are the strongest and when taken conjunction capture the fundamental objection most of the "grilling class" in the US have to the intersectional model of race advocated by both the woke-left and alt-right. The rest strike me as weak/non-sequiturs that don't actually address anyone's actual positions. "Modern dictionaries do not define race biologically" how is that even an argument?
Objection 1 is a fallacy commonly known as 'sorites's paradox or the beard fallacy' by people who pay attention to philosophy.
It's really not a valid one, when any child can distinguish between races at a glance and is only nonplussed if you assemble a bunch of mixed race people, who are really not a central example of anything.
Also, racial 'continua' are quite spotty in places, the edge cases where it's hard to decide are not that common at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I only address objection 1: if you take that seriously, we have to abandon our notions of color generally (which are defined around a prototypical center, but don't have clear boundaries, and are situated on a spectrum).
So, if you believe in red and green, you shouldn't object to races/populations.
More options
Context Copy link
Others have done a great job calling out your professor's sophistry, so let me be a tiny bit charitable to one portion of his argument.
The classic definition of race was basically "a branch of the human family tree." From Webster's 1913:
This turns out to not quite be true, at least for most groupings we commonly refer to as "races." What happens is that "populations" get separated from other populations, evolve a distinct set of characteristics, but then after a while they usually end up mixing with some other population nearby, and so what we commonly call a race, like "Han Chinese" is not a single branch of the human family tree, but rather an admixture of multiple populations.
Still, just because things are more complicated than the 1913 definition of "race", that is not a reason to say "therefore there is no biological basis for race." That is moving in the wrong direction, making things even more inaccurate. Honest critics should just work on making the definition of "race" more accurate. The simplest, accurate definition of race that matches a real phenomena and cuts reality of the joins and matches how people intuitively use the word is: "a race is cluster of relatedness." So even though "Han Chinese" is an admixture of several ancestral populations, that admixture forms a very distinct cluster of relatedness that is obviously different than Slavic White people, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
1-3 are good arguments against poor ideas of race, or racism, but not smarter ones. Races - uh - subpopulations with significant shared heredity and traits - can still be smarter or have different characters than other subpopulations, just like subspecies / populations of animals, which also can have messy boundaries and mixes of traits while retaining distinctions. If jews were 50 iq points smarter than blacks on average, 1-5 could still easily be true - and in that situation 'jewish' as a 'race' is worth distinguishing, although even without the term 'race' it'd be extremely obvious
Argument 1 proves bad faith on part of the professor as it relies on the beard fallacy. which he as a philosophy professor should be well aware of!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What I expect from a philosophy professor, a pathetic string of non-sequiturs in place of an argument.
1: So? Humans are horny and indiscriminate, our racial groups are fuzzy and admixed. This does not mean they're not biological, it just means the biology is complicated.
2: Races, populations, nations, peoples. All of them fuzzy groupings of people with differing ancestries, but they often have or develop a distinctive look, culture, language etc. "Oh, we call race 'population' now" is kindergarten-level semantics. Sounds like someone doesn't want to define terms too precisely, lest their arguments self-immolate.
3: Not only wrong, stupidly so. There are no reliable clusters of characteristics? So there's no possibility the average person would be able to tell a black man from Nigeria from a white man from Iceland? There's just no plausible way anyone could divine the difference between a Pygmy and a Chinese person?
4: The dictionary? Really? That's how a philosophy prof wants to prove shit? Someone revoke this guy's PHD.
5: This one is trivially true, but who is arguing for "racial essence"? This is a bullshit line intended to "catch" people who disagree, and therefore must necessarily believe in a racial essence. No such thing as a racial essence, and the attempt to argue against it is the worst sort of strawmanning.
Now that I'm done, this list is so bad I'm wondering if it's a secret plan to get y'all talking about logical fallacies and bad arguments. If this was not planned to be bad, it is the worst set of arguments I've ever seen from a literate human being.
Um lots of people.
Sure, they might not use the exact words "racial essence" but is the existence of some such quality not the foundational axiom that underpins intersectionalists', HBDists', and old-school racists' entire worldview? "Racial essence" is the quality that allows wealthy academics and media talking-heads to claim that they are being "oppressed" by poor white coal miners. It is the quality that allows the 14-worders to exclude "mongrel children" from the future they seek to secure, and it is the quality that allows hi IQ autists who are extremely concerned about dysgenics to imagine that it's normies seeking mates and having kids without concern for eugenics who are the real threat to civilization rather than the secular utopians such as himself.
"HBDist" here, and it's not true. It's right in the name: "Biological", not spiritual.
I'm sure there's some overlap between people who believe in a racial essence and people who believe differing populations are distinguishable genetically. The latter position is a pre-requisite to the former, but not a necessary one.
...and Black Bloc call themselves "Anti-fascists" while marching around in black shirts, waving red and black flags, and threatening to beat up anyone who isn't on board with their radical socialist agenda.
The name is not the relevant distinction here.
Ok mate. Everyone but me in the world who thinks there is any validity to the science of (usually minor average) genetic differences between the very general human groups variously referred to as race, tribe, people, nation or population subscribe permanently and exclusively to a metaphysical and spiritual understanding of "race", and furthermore to a "correct" ordering of those races as a moral hierarchy. The alternative is unthinkable.
Not everyone, just the vast majority.
I don't think it's all that controversial to say that the blue/grey tribe in general places a great deal of weight on intelligence when determining moral worth. IE that it is always better to be "smart". Furthermore I would suggest that this tendency is especially pronounced amongst the sort of WEIRD secular type who makes the validity of "Science!" a central component of their identity/worldview.
Accordingly such an individual who believes in HBD can not truthfully deny ascribing a moral/metaphysical weight to race.
They might attempt to launder their desire to judge people by the color of their skin rather the content of their character through words like "polygenic traits" and the like but ultimately the impulse and it's end-point are the same.
Your telepathy is, as always, plausible but not final.
Never claimed that it was.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No matter how many times you mischaracterize arguments, you won't thereby bring them into existence.
Is it really a "mischaracterization"? As @PutAHelmetOn observes up thread, there seems to be this assumption that race and racism are somehow special cases that ought to be set aside and that is what is being challenged.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Imagine you plot some datapoints of two different variables.
Clusters form. But the maximum euclidean distance within a cluster is often times smaller than the minimum distance between the clusters.
Therefore the clusters dont exist?
Thats the argument your professor is essentially making.
As others with said, you can tell which cluster a person would belong to just by looking at them. Yes ultimately race is a semantic category but that being as such doesnt mean the categorization is not pragmatically useful.
The country of France is also just a semantic category. But your model of the world would be less reliable if you disnt acknowledge the existence of France because where France ends and where Italy begins is not metaphysically solid.
More options
Context Copy link
Look with your eyes. If you see someone, you can usually tell what race they are. If race had no biological basis, you wouldn't be able to do this because there would not be reliable clusters of traits that you could identify. They aren't perfectly defined clusters with sharp boundaries: you cannot with 100% accuracy identify the race of every person just by looking at them, and there are patterns which go beyond what the eye can visibly determine. And it's largely subjective: human-defined categories that decide which patterns do or do not count as part of which race. But the foundation is clearly biological otherwise there wouldn't be any patterns for you to detect in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm only going to address (1) and (3) since (2) and (4) are just appeals to authority.
You can locate boundaries between racial types, and there are reliable lumpings/clusters of characteristics to track. These boundaries just aren't "parallel to the axes" - as in, if the X-axis is color and the Y-axis is hair curliness, the boundary might not be a vertical or horizontal line. But also any random geneticist can build nicely separated clusters of humans with bog standard statistical techniques. Here's Razib Khan, for example, being a nerd about Bengali genetics:
https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/09/01/most-of-the-east-asian-in-east-bengalis-is-not-from-the-munda/
https://i0.wp.com/www.brownpundits.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Rplot05.png?ssl=1
(Note that PC1 and PC2 in the graphs are principal components, not an individual feature.)
Also, there is no "unique" boundary because Bengalis and Tibetans are separated so much that lots of different lines would do a good job of separating them.
When I read this sentence, two thoughts went through my head one after the other:
You can't expect a professor teaching a "philosophy of race" class to understand principal component analysis or clustering or population/individual genetics. Those are math and science; totally different departments!
... But if they don't understand the extremely relevant math and science in this case, and proceed to talk nonsense because of that ignorance, then what the hell good are they? And why should anybody take them seriously?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Objection #1 is basically the Loki's Wager fallacy. Basically Loki made a bet with a dwarf and lost, and the stakes were his head. Being the trickster that he is, he argued that the dwarf couldn't determine where his head ended and his neck began, and that the dwarf didn't have any claim to any part of his neck. And since the dwarf didn't have any claim to any part of his neck and couldn't clearly define where his head ended and neck began, he couldn't take Loki's head either.
Makes for fun folklore but terrible logic. Just because you can't precisely define where your head ends and neck begins doesn't mean you don't have either.
Also funny, since the obvious solution would be for the dwarf to simply cut part of the head off, while completely bypassing the neck.
I mean, the dwarves responded by sewing his mouth shut, so...?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Naraburns pretty much handled my objections to this sophistry. But it's also possible to bypass it entirely. Consider this study which made a big splash when it was first announced. What it says is that machine learning models can accurately determine self-identified race from medical images. And this holds for multiple modalities of medical image, and it is robust to various filtering of those images. What this means is that what we usually call race is well-correlated with physical features (because that's all these images detect; there's no social component to a CT scan). Or as I usually put it, race is real and it is pervasive.
"The model needed training data. What if the training data was biased? Garbage in, garbage out."
How would you respond to something like that?
With physical violence, because it would be a chance to make stupidity hurt.
It almost doesn't matter how the model was trained; about the only exception would be if you were testing with data in the training set. It doesn't matter how the model was developed to determine race from medical images; the point is that it does.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the simplest counter-argument is that, however hard it is to define, race is clearly a useful and relatively unambiguous word in many contexts. If your professor is comfortable saying anything at all about people of any race, e.g. "black people are stopped more often by police", it's not clear why it matters whether it can be defined biologically.
It's a strange bit of sophistry that people who spend all day making claims about disparate outcomes between races consider it unscientific, or somehow ontologically lacking, to make analogous claims in other contexts.
One possible way "race is socially constructed" could be meant is if "race" means "social race." For example, in the past people argued over whether Italians and Greeks were white. A couple weeks ago, we argued if Jews are white. Surely, whether they are "really white" is a silly question, but that is just because categories are fuzzy; the race category itself is not uniquely bad.
This is the only way I can defend this, while salvaging the ability to talk about "black people are stopped more by police."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Surely a philosophy professor should be familiar with the paradox of the heap? Does he avoid using the word "heap" because of it? What about "hot" or "biped"? The vast majority of words have various levels of vague boundaries.
I recently watched a video of Richard Dawkins explaining the evolution of the eye on a creationist talkshow. I wasn't aware of the science, but Dawkins explains how an eyeball can be created incrementally, and also claims that there are organisms we can see today that have these half-baked eyes. So we can really see how the eye evolved.
(Summary for those who don't want to watch): The earliest proto-eye is just a flat light sensor, that lets organisms know if its day or night. Sometimes the sensor is curved concave, which means different angles of the sun spread different light intensities to different parts of the surface. With the right neuro circuitry, an organism can detect the direction of light. Increase the curvature, and the light compass becomes more precise. Eventually, if the sensor ever curves over itself like a sphere, with just a little peephole (we might call it a pupil), the organism can detect the direction of all light ingress.
That's a long digression, but I guess eyeballs don't exist either!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Steve Sailer wrote a race FAQ back in
20142007 that holds up well: https://archive.ph/28BSptl;dr: Trying to talk about race in terms of traits fails, but that's because race is about ancestry.
More options
Context Copy link
These lines of argumentation kinda strike me as arguing that monogamy doesn't real because people cheat. Like, sure, the map is not the territory, but that's not a good reason to throw out the map.
My other thought is that race is a "thick" concept that bundles various things together — phenotype, ethnicity, culture (sometimes including nationality), and the emergent socioeconomic connotations of combinations thereof.
More options
Context Copy link
Objection 4 is just circular. "Defining race biologically is a mistake because that's not how race is defined [in the dictionary]" is just a premise being repeated as a conclusion.
The other objections are fine, I guess, but only insofar as your professor also objects to, like, the idea of a "species," or a "breed," or even the term "life." This is classic postmodern language games: if you can't be perfectly correct 100% of the time, then you must have no idea what you're talking about! But this is an isolated demand for rigor; there are likely no terms that withstand this level of demand (with the possible exception of mathematical terms, but even these have been called into question).
On #1, if you need to draw precise lines between groups of people, then "race" is going to be of somewhat limited use (though probably not no use). But how often do you actually need to do that? On the other hand, there are a number of fuzzy lines that are nevertheless useful. If you want to screen people for sickle cell anemia, for example, but you don't have infinite resources for doing so (who does?), then you should prioritize black people. Yeah, you might get overbroad or underinclusive in some cases, but eyeballing "race: black=increased risk of sickle cell anemia" is going to absolutely get you most of the way.
On #2, "scientists" (which scientists?) do talk about race, sometimes, but even when they don't they are often just using a different term that capture the concept of race without using the word. If for some reason you don't like the word race, fine? I guess? But when you tell someone you're interested in the comparative prevalence of sickle cell anemia among the American descendants of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans, at some point someone tired of saying that many words is going to just say "black" and no one is going to be confused by that.
On #3, okay, but some horses are brown and some are dapple and some are gray, and yet somehow we can still tell a horse from a donkey even if sometimes people get that wrong.
On #5, there is no "essence" of race because (per #3!) the biological underpinnings of race are fuzzy-bounded trait clusters. What counts as an "adequate scientific account?" Asians tend to be lactose intolerant. But how do you know any particular Asian is lactose intolerant? Doing a complete genetic screening would be more accurate than looking at someone and guessing that, based on their apparent race, they might be lactose intolerant, but "hmm, this patient appears Asian and complaining of stomach problems, I should ask about dairy consumption" seems perfectly scientifically "adequate" in the scientific context of medical care.
I get the impression that your philosophy professor--as someone teaching philosophy of race, specifically--has a somewhat predictable agenda. These particular arguments show that agenda to be prioritizing the burying of race-as-biology without ever clearly explaining the benefit of doing so. Objection #2 hits closest to the mark--in many sociological or anthropological contexts, "race" is unlikely to be a better concept than fine-grained ethnographic categorization. Discussing the descendants of American slaves and the aborigines of Australia as both being "black" conflates two extremely different populations, separated by thousands of miles over thousands of years. But this doesn't mean race is not a biological concept at all, it means that some contexts demand greater particularity than others, and race is not a very high-particularity concept. In many biological contexts, however, it clearly serves; objecting to its use in those contexts is not philosophically warranted, it's just an attempt to police wrongthink.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link